The Democrats’ Southern Strategy

“In May 1866, a little group of young men in the Tennessee village of Pulaski, finding their time hang heavily on their hands after the excitement of the field, so lately abandoned, formed a secret club for the mere pleasure of association, for private amusement — for anything that might break the monotony of the too quiet place, as their wits might work upon the matter, and one of their number suggested that they call themselves the Kuklos, the Circle.”

This prettified depiction of the founding of the Ku Klux Klan is from A History of the American People by Princeton professor and future President Woodrow Wilson.

The main activities of the Klan, wrote Wilson, were “pranks,” “mischief” and “frolicking.” Occasionally they did prey upon blacks, Wilson conceded, but black fears of the Klan were “comic.”

In Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, Bruce Bartlett relates countless such anecdotes to show that while the Republican Party is endlessly smeared as racist, at its worst, it could not hold a candle to the party of Wilson and FDR.

What brings this history up is the media assault on Gov. Haley Barbour for his answer to an interviewer’s question as to why his hometown, Yazoo City, avoided the violence that attended the desegregation of other cities in the Mississippi of his youth. Haley’s reply:

“You heard of the Citizens’ Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City, they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their a– run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

No one has contradicted the facts as stated by Haley, that the Citizens’ Council of Yazoo City consisted of “town leaders” who did not want any Klan violence ripping their town apart.

But if Haley had meant to leave the impression that the White Citizens’ Councils were promoting peaceful integration, that would have been laughable. Like almost all the U.S. senators from the 11 states of the Old Confederacy who signed the Dixie Manifesto opposing the Brown decision, the White Citizens’ Councils believed in massive resistance to integration.

After 24 hours of media bashing, Haley sought to silence his tormenters with this clarification:

“My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens’ Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country and especially African-Americans who were persecuted in that time.”

Thus did Haley throw the town fathers of Yazoo City, many of whom he must have come to know as friends, under the bus to restore his acceptability to media elites, some of whom he probably detests.

Such are the demands of political advancement in America.

Yet, as Voltaire observed, history is a pack of lies agreed upon.

Undeniably, across the South in the 1950s and 1960s, there was broad and deep resistance to integration. But it is also true that all the Senate signers of the Dixie Manifesto and all but two of the House signers were Democrats in good standing in the party of JFK and LBJ.

And while civil right workers and others were brutally killed in the 1960s, the real racial violence occurred in the North — in the Harlem riot of 1964, the Watts riot of 1965, the Detroit and Newark riots of 1967 and the wave of riots that broke out in scores of cities after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. There were days of looting and burning in Washington, D.C.

Who was responsible for that wave of racial violence? Was it the black rioters themselves? The Democratic machines and mayors that ran almost all of the Northern cities? The Johnson administration?

Because it was surely not Republicans, who in the 1960s were nonexistent in the South and shut out of power in Washington and most major cities and state capitals after JFK’s victory and LBJ’s landslide.

The Nixon White House is endlessly denounced for a “Southern Strategy” that captured all 11 states of the Old Confederacy in 1972. But Nixon’s vice president was a pro-civil rights governor, Spiro Agnew of Maryland, who had defeated George P. (“your-home-is-your-castle”) Mahoney, a Democrat who ran in 1966 on his opposition to open housing.

In the six presidential elections in which Wilson and FDR topped the ticket, Democrats carried all 11 Southern states every time.

Outside of Missouri, Deep South states were the only ones Adlai Stevenson carried in 1956. The sainted Adlai balanced both his tickets with Dixiecrats: John Sparkman of Alabama and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

As Haley Barbour can attest, liberal hypocrisy is exceeded only by liberal amnesia about who kept them in power from 1933 to 1968.

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22 Responses to The Democrats’ Southern Strategy

This article omits mentioning that the Democratic President Truman desegregated the armed forces, not any Republican. There was turmoil for decades within the Democratic Party over civil rights, and by the Fifties Southern Democrats were practically a separate party, referred to accurately here as Dixiecrats. There were both conservatives and liberals on both sides of the civil rights struggle. In the end, the northern, liberal wing of Kennedy Democrats won out, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights acts.

At which point, the Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic party somewhat en masse and became Republicans, which party eagerly embraced and defended them, as this column does. And what was formerly the Solid South for Democrats became equally solid for Republicans.

Yes, the Democrats were wrong on this issue for a long time, and got Southern votes as a result. When they changed, so did the South, and so did the Republicans. Most of this was forty or fifty years ago. What exactly is its relevance now? Taken in aggregate, there was close to a Second Civil War in this country, and theorists like Lind would probably consider that event overall to be a form of Fourth Generation war. The decision by some Southern governors to not have their state police engage in open combat with the Federal troops in the National Guard at the height of the integration controversy during the Kennedy administration is the only reason there was not an actual war. And we still hear, occasionally, Republicans defending Strom Thurmond and his ilk.

Race-based slavery was a curse on this Republic at its birth, almost destroyed it, and haunted it even Constitutionally until relatively recently. It is arguable that the United States was an apartheid regime until the 1960s. Are modern Republicans proud of this? Is the argument made here that the Democrats should have changed sooner? A country that is essentially better than South Africa only by a few decades should be far more sanguine whenever discussing this topic. Humility is in order on all sides. This without even mentioning the role of so-called ‘Christianity…’

“Who was responsible for that wave of racial violence? Was it the black rioters themselves? The Democratic machines and mayors that ran almost all of the Northern cities? The Johnson administration?

“Because it was surely not Republicans, who in the 1960s were nonexistent in the South and shut out of power in Washington and most major cities and state capitals after JFK’s victory and LBJ’s landslide.”

Strawman much, Pat? Who said the Republicans were to blame for the lives lost in the Northern riots, or, for that matter, in the fight against segregation in the South?

“Liberals” of both parties were the ones who got the Civil Rights Laws passed, against the resistance of Southern Democrats, yes, but also some Republican conservatives, like Barry Goldwater. Democrats ruled the South, and, as Pat says, the big cities in the North too. Never, not anywhere or from anyone, have I heard the accusation that the Republican party was responsible for the deaths in question.

Overall, I’m not sure what the point is here. That Democrats, by and large, were the party of overt white racism from the Jacksonian period until some point in the 1960’s? I thought everyone already knew that. Similarly, I thought that most people also knew that the Democrats changed their ways in the 1960’s, even though they knew it would cost them electorally in the South and in other places where white racism was prevalent. And that everyone knew that the Republican party, at its inception and for many years after, was much more in favor of racial equality than the Democrats.

So more Democrats voted for it than Republicans, but a higher percentage of Republicans voted for it than Democrats. And, of course, it was LBJ, a Democrat, who knocked heads together to get that vote and who signed the bill into law.

Again, as Pat mentions, the Republicans were pretty much out of the loop. Neither the defenders of segregation in the Deep South, nor in power in Washington or Detroit, Chicago, etc. But, again, who said otherwise?

The Seccessionists were (mostly) Democrats. The Klan was almost entirely made up of Democrats. Extreme racist Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat. The Southern segregationists in power in State governments during the CRM were Democrats. As were the Citizens Councils.

The Citizen Councils worked to preserve segregation. So membership in them or endorsement of them now is seen as bad. Why wouldn’t this be so? Should Barbour get a pass on this because the Councils were run by Democrats? Is that what Pat thinks the “media elites” should be doing? Rehabilatating the Citizens Council because they weren’t as bad as the Klan? Or because they were run by Democrats? If a Democrat would have come out with Barbour’s statement, would the media reaction have been any different?

Then too, it seems as if Pat wants it both ways. The Republicans had nothing to do with anything, because they were out of power, yet Agnew is to be praised for his civil rights stance. Most Republicans during the CRM were in favor of integration, as the vote on the 1964 bill shows. So, if there is any “blame” to be attached to the CRM or the Civil Rights Act for the deaths in the riots, the Republican party WOULD seem to have to share in that blame.

Personally, I don’t the CRM or the Civil Rights Act was to blame. But that still leaves me wondering what the point of this column is. It seems like purely partisan nonsense. Barbour was criticized for supporting a pro segregationist organization. That’s the “media” story. What the racist, pre 1960’s history of the Democratic party, or the fact that the Democrats were in power during the riots of the 1960’s, have to do with that, is anyone’s guess.

Excellent comments, Greg. Pat isn’t ignorant of the history, he just choses to ignore it in order to flack for Mr. Barbour. Pat knows full well that it was Reagan, not Carter, who kicked off his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair. He’s well aware of Johnson’s “lost the south for a generation” comment made upon signing the Civil Rights Act. He knows that the Republicans gladly welcomed the”Dixiecrats” into their ranks and took up the antebellum theology of States Rights, a code-phrase that everyone who lived through the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South understands (as I recall, it was almost always used in a paragraph which also included the phrase ‘Outside Agitator’, code for “uppity and/or northern N-word”).
I’m not sure why Pat feels obliged to write in support of Barbour, who not only represents everything repulsive about the neocon Republican establishment, but is also totally un-electable on a national level. I suspect it’s a bad habit created by spending way too much time around Richard “King of the Paranoiacs” Nixon.

It isn’t so much that Greg and Mitch are wrong as it is that they are attaching a disproportionate significance to those points of fact that they are correct about. They have the history of the Southern Strategy figured properly, but what meaning, exactly, should that past have today? Are they trying to argue that Pat and Haley support segregation today? I ask, because it doesn’t seem that they are. Does receiving votes from people who formerly supported segregation confer some sort of uncleanness onto people who unequivocally disavow that principle today? Why should it? If we look back into history, we find all sorts of coalitions of people who supported things that we agree today are unworthy of support. Should everyone who supported odious things in former times be cast out of the system? If so, there wouldn’t be much of an electoral system left.

When the Framers amended our Constitution to include a Bill of Rights, they included the Eighth, which (among other things) prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. While today, this amendment is interpreted as though it existed to make sure that no Death Row inmate ever gets a tummyache, studies of the Framers’ intentions suggest that they were trying to ensure that a few nasty ideas from Europe stayed on that side of the water. One of the nastiest was punishment by Pollution of Blood. That idea held that punishments for certain crimes were transferable from generation to generation. This, of course, struck the Framers as being rather unfair, and thank goodness it did, but the supreme irony is that some sections of our national commentariat have tried to apply that punishment to white southerners as a reprimand for the way the parents of those southerners once voted. That strikes me as being both cruel AND unusual…

I’m not arguing that Pat and Haley overtly support segregation today, although I strongly suspect that only “political correctness” prevents them from doing so. I also don’t wish to infer that either are suffering from a ‘generational curse’, but I would suggest that Haley Barbour is in a direct line of descent from Ross Barnett, George Wallace, and Lester Maddox. All the above were Democrats as defined in their time and place, but all of them would be Republicans today. Mississippians are well aware of this, and most American voters are too – which is why I think Mr.Barbour’s national ambitions are doomed.
My point is that Pat’s description of “the Democrats’ Southern Strategy” is totally disingenuous, and Pat (and Mr. Barbour) know it.

Pat Buchanan curiously left out one clear example of his “Racist Democrats vs. Integrationist Republicans” thesis.

In 1968, John Lindsay, a pro-integrationist Republican, stood firmly for integration of the Forest Hills neighborhood in Queens, and for community control of public schools in the black neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn. He was viciously opposed by such Democrats as Neoconservative godfather Norman Podhoretz, future Mayor Ed Koch and Al Shankar, the head of the (overwhelmingly Democratic) New York Federation of Teachers, who took his union out on strike as a result. (Those who crossed the picket lines were called, not “scabs,” but “N—–R Lovers” by the striking teachers.) Despite the opposition, Lindsay stood firm. A true profile in courage, considering the fact that these episodes certainly destroyed his once-bright political career.

So, what happened? Lindsay became a Democrat (and, to my knowledge, neither then-Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, nor his boss the [Republican] President, did anything to stop him), and Podhoretz became an in-fact Republican and Koch a de facto one. Not exactly supportive of Pat’s thesis, is it?

But then, Pat’s entire thesis is based on historical speciousness. A man as versed in history as Pat is knows perfectly well that the civil rights struggle was never Democrat vs. Republican, but conservative vs. liberal (TRUE liberal, as opposed to the many phony ones whose cowardice and hypocrisy on the race issue was indeed despicable. Take Woodrow Wilson–please!), and, really, northern vs. southern. (Once again, Pat modestly keeps himself out of the picture. Or, as he was rising to power and prominence in the G.O.P. and the conservative movement, was he really trying to champion the cause of such Republicans as Jacob Javits, Nelson Rockefeller, Kenneth Keating, Charles Goodell, Clifford Case, Edward Brooke and the aforementioned John Lindsay–strong civil rights advocates, all–and just never got the proper credit for it?)

As for Spiro Agnew, Pat is indeed correct that he ran as a racial liberal for Governor of Maryland in 1966. (Just as Pat’s boss Richard Nixon pledged his undying emnity toward “Red China” as he sought the G.O.P. Presidential nomination in 1968.) Alas, Pat left out Agnew’s memorable (except, obviously, to him) screed on live television during the Baltimore riots of 1968. (Agnew blasted the city’s moderate black leadership, then desperately trying to hold the lid on the black community’s anger after Martin Luther King’s assassination, as all virtual agents of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. It was this performance that led none other than Democrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond to recommend Agnew as Nixon’s vice-president.)

And, speaking of Strom Thurmond….just why would he leave the “racist” Democrats in 1964, to join the “integrationist” Republicans? (For that matter, why did he bolt the Democrats in 1948, and take the Solid South with him?) And why did the five Deep South states vote for Barry Goldwater (who in fact had a better civil rights record than many liberals–prior to 1960, that is) in 1964? His pledge to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority, perhaps?

I could go on, but….enough. Pat, let it go. Just be proud of the fact that Norman Podhoretz now hates you more than he ever hated John Lindsay.

“Outside of Missouri, Deep South states were the only ones Adlai Stevenson carried in 1956. The sainted Adlai balanced both his tickets with Dixiecrats: John Sparkman of Alabama and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.”

A small quibble, Pat. It is totally misleading to characterize Kefauver as a “Dixiecrat.” For his time and place, Kefauver was a very progressive and liberal politician. He was one of only three Southern senators who refused to sign the Southern Manifesto, the others being Albert Gore, Sr., also of Tennessee, and Lyndon Johnson of Texas famehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estes_Kefauver

Please. No one is arguing that people can’t change, or should be “punished” for things that they did years ago. Much less that their descendants should be punished. Spare us the histrionics. And being condemned in “the media” is not even remotely the same thing as being punished by the State, which is what the Eighth Amendment is about.

But all of that is irrelevant. The point is that Barbour is being criticized in the media (not punished by the State) for things that he is saying NOW. Not for ancient misdeeds. Not for the sins of his father and forefathers.

And that’s where Pat goes off the rails. He provides no reason for his outrage, and clouds the water by bringing up ancient history. To repeat: Barbour defended a segregationist organization this year, and that’s why he is under fire. The rest of it is all smokescreen/red herring.

I respect Pat Buchanon immensely for taking on the neo cons. I respect him for challenging his party head on for years over its grotesque foreign policy. But, every once in a while, I think Pat feels the need to throw some “red meat” to his former Republican colleagues and supporters. And that’s the only explanation I can find for this column.

As the other comments above illustrate, this is one of the worst columns in recent memory from Mr. Buchanan. It’s sadly typical of some of his work. Even when he ran as the Reform Party candidate back in 2000, Buchanan was too much a good soldier of the GOP and did not bash Bush the way that Nader ripped into Gore. I suspect it turned the man who whacked Bush patria badly in 92 and scared the Republican establishment in 96 to the utter joke of 2000 when he got the backing of VP to be Ezola Foster and less than one half of one percent of the popular vote.

“I suspect it turned the man who whacked Bush patria badly in 92 and scared the Republican establishment in 96 to the utter joke of 2000 when he got the backing of VP to be Ezola Foster and less than one half of one percent of the popular vote.”

To Pat’s great credit, he did not demand a recount in 2000 and thus spared the nation a long, drawn-out process, in sharp contrast to that rascal Al Gore.

The Civil Wrongs Acts should be repealed and never should have been enacted. The sections on so-called “public accomodations,” “equal employment,” and “fair housing”
are total violations of individual property rights and corporations are only individuals too.
Government should be restricted to outlawing government segregation and not enacting blatantly racist affirmative action.
It’s surprisingly at this late date after a century of out of control black crime and general sociopathology that we still
have mindless white libs attempting to defend the indefensible.
Both parties are corrupt here. Forced integration is the flip side of Jim Crow laws and slavery. That’s the only issue here,
not what Ted Agnew thought in 1966, about which he later changed his mind.

The debates on whether Buchanan’s history is correct (it is not) or whether he carries too much water for the GOP (he does) overlook the real issue here. The comment above by Steve Hansen is the only important thing.

In line with the preposterous article by Buchanan, the post by Hansen is as clear a demonstration as is possible as to why the recent vogue for nullification is such a catastrophically bad idea. I am not sure if Sebastian is supportive or not of the Hansen post. The language is somewhat ambiguous….

On the McLaughlin Report this past weekend, Buchanan said Sarah Palin was the “darling of the Tea Party” approvingly.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I had the impression Palin is at the very least controversial in the Tea Party and that a substantial minority if not an actual majority oppose her Israel First ,superhawkish foreign policy.

Same request for correction, but I also had the impression Buchanan would know this. If so, his continuing admiration to the point of lying about Palin’s popularity is another strike against his integrity.

Palin’s intellectual helplessness and historical ignorance confirms the left’s belief that the Tea Party is stupid and lays her wide open to inevitable neocon sock-puppetry. She’s a good woman and a good American (even if she did make the crude error of displaying an Israeli flag on her desk) but she’s not up to the job of representing the Tea Party.

And she’s not needed. Only a fraction of winning insurgents had Palin’s backing.

I’m glad that we’re both clear that my metaphor wasn’t meant to be taken literally. It’s also worth pointing out that Barbour never said that his town’s Citizen’s Council was wonderful or exemplary, but only that they kept the Klan from becoming violent in his town. That’s a historical assertion, not some sort of praise. He took heat for it because he was a southern conservative, which is based on “ancient history” of the exact sort that you complain about Pat referencing.

One lazy dog, you are aptly named, you produce no arguments whatsoever to refute my thesis. Why anyone
would think that people on a conservative website would
endorse the leftist standard view of the civil wrongs crusade is
beyond belief.
Anyone who can read and think will realize that Sebastian’s
comment is supportive of my comments, for which I thank
him. The only thing wrong with Buchanan’s comments are
that it didn’t tackle the evil of the modern civil wrongs movement at its statist base.
Factually his column is quite correct.
But the Republicans who supported the statist civil wrongs
legislation are to be condemned as much as their Democratic
counterparts.
I hadn’t thought much of nullification but if people like one lazy
dog are opposed to it it might have merit.

“I’m glad that we’re both clear that my metaphor wasn’t meant to be taken literally.”

Actually, you didn’t make that clear at all. Throughout your paragraph discussing the 8th Amendment, you continually used the term “punishment.” If you had meant to speak in terms of metaphors, you should have said so. Even then, your analogy would have been totally inapposite and grotesquely misplaced, but at least you would have succeeded in expressing what, I gather from your latest salvo, you were attempting to say.

“It’s also worth pointing out that Barbour never said that his town’s Citizen’s Council was wonderful or exemplary, but only that they kept the Klan from becoming violent in his town. That’s a historical assertion, not some sort of praise.”

Not quite. Barbour was asked why his home town was able to desegregate without violence. Here’s what Barbour said:

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it…You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

First of all, it sure sounds like “praise” to me. Secondly, it misrepesents by omission. While the Council may have opposed the Klan, it was certainly also opposed to desegregation. That was the main purpose of these “councils,” to preserve segregation, not merely to provide an organization for “town leaders,” and not to oppose the Klan.

“He took heat for it because he was a southern conservative, which is based on ‘ancient history’ of the exact sort that you complain about Pat referencing.”

No. He took “heat” for his remarks because his remarks, despite what you say, were in praise of a segregationist organization. His remarks were made this month, not in some “ancient” setting. And any politician who made similar remarks today, whether he was a Southernor, a conservative, and a Republican, or not, would have been subjected to the same heat. Pat’s comments simply make no sense, except in terms of pure partisanship.